Hold the students, not the tools, accountable

ChatGPT has been a controversial topic in the past few months because of its impressive ability to write papers automatically, with quality that can avoid detection at most institutions. It has been a viral subject across social media with many students praising it for its intelligence and celebrating the fact that their automatically generated essays were given a good grade by their professors.

Others, however, have not been so positive about this program, with many complaining that this technology is enabling lazy and plagiaristic behavior. Some people have even gone as far as to create solutions to this program that detect whether or not a paper was generated by ChatGPT, although reliability/accuracy has been a main concern for both critics and supporters of these programs.

With all this in mind, I believe that this artificial intelligence technology is leading us in a direction of both hope and fear. As a guy who is big on liberty and cybersecurity, I think that the potential for crackdowns on ChatGPT and other similar AI programs is quite scary. The fact that a program meant to detect whether or not it was AI-generated may incorrectly mark a legitimate paper as “AI written” is a threatening prospect and calls for a major rework of the program.

As for the liberty aspect of it, I believe that tools like ChatGPT should remain publicly available, because they can be useful if not used maliciously. It is a matter of who uses the tool rather than the tool itself being the problem. The automatically generated essay didn’t turn itself in; a dishonest student did. Such tools can be used to generate helpful articles on niche matters that can be hard to research for the uninitiated, but as described before, it’s a razor sharp double-edged sword when it comes to such matters.

Instead of trying to shut such programs down completely, tools preventing dishonest students from using the program maliciously should be worked on and improved.

Matthew Mazon, Montecito